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Comment by benrbray | Hacker News Reader

Those of you who think that remote-work-by-default would be a good thing, can I ask how your companies are handling career progression and collaboration, as well as mentorship of junior developers?

Listen to Adam Savage [1] talk about his early career as a prop-maker. I just don't see how that sort of deep collaboration is possible remotely. As a recent graduate whose first full-time job has been full remote due to the pandemic, I'm terrified that this is going to kill my career progression, not only upwards but also laterally. I just don't have the same opportunities to 1) learn from people or 2) bump into new people as I would if we're all forced to be in the same place.

[1]: https://youtu.be/qvU5PZgSowk?t=148

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Sure. The company I work at has always been remote-only, and I've been at it for over 5 years.

We pair new hires, regardless of ability, with a mentor. They have access to a full checklist of on-boarding tasks and an actively maintained Basecamp.

Perhaps the key point is that we do not have "hidden" discussions. Even the voice discussions have notes taken and recorded, and planning sessions are done via a recorded Miro board. Day-to-day project management is entirely in Basecamp and Slack. Anything in Slack that's worth noting is made into a Basecamp task for posterity.

We're a flat hierarchy, and we encourage team members to be vocal about what they want to work on. The entire team plans quarterly targets and goals.

It's, honestly, kinda awesome.

Edit: we're less than 50 people, and that makes it easier not to have a hierarchy since most features are built by one or two people.

Any time I read "flat hierarchy" in a job posting I feel the urge to run. That may be true contractually, but there is _always_ a hierarchy.

Yes, and it comes with the opposite problem of hierarchy - working for a manager who has 30-50 direct reports and no time for you or anyone on the team.

Same here. I've worked at a few companies like that, and it's always a ton of office politics with senior employees never being held accountable because they're not technically in charge. It's a prime example of "some are more equal than others".

Thanks for sharing, I think the "no hidden discussions" idea is important. I had a few internships in the before times, and I learned the most by pulling up a chair to other engineers / researchers who were already talking about something, and just listening to how they talk through problems. In my remote job I don't really get a chance to eavesdrop on someone's zoom call.

I think there are a lot of "implicit" benefits of being in-person that remote companies need to make more "explicit" to be successful. It sounds like your company has the right idea!

If you don’t mind me sharing, I’m also building something for making discussions more transparent and discoverable. https://AsyncGo.com just launched and I’d love to hear your feedback.

> We're a flat hierarchy, and we encourage team members to be vocal about what they want to work on. The entire team plans quarterly targets and goals.

To be quite sincere, I've heard this before. And it ALWAYS ends like Animal Farm. Some are "more equal" than others, especially if your company has the usual upper management.

I think it works fine for smaller organizations with less than 50 people. It may not work so well with companies that are rapidly going and already stretching their culture to its limits. It still greatly depends on who is running the company, what the goals are, etc. At your average tech company, mentorship and autonomy matter way more than someone assigning you a direct manager that simply checks boxes on some annual review form. I believe in a strong technical leadership model while keeping the "management hierarchy" flat. E.g. having "direct reports" becomes important when you have enough people that upper management can't give someone dedicated time. There are plenty of ways to keep things flatter and not fall into the traps of having a traditional management hierarchy. It simply takes some thought. You can't absolve your organization of needing management by simply declaring yourself "flat", but there are benefits to how agile an organization can be the flatter they can get, IMO.

This is definitely an issue in any team or organization. Unless you're smaller than 10 employees, eventually office/career politics will dominate. It's inevitable human nature.

This is the frustration I have with my current role. The company is great and the team is awesome. But getting to work on anything that interests me is impossible. All of the great, fun projects go to other team members. The issue compounds itself because now that I don't work on the stuff that I'm good at / want to do, people on my team have pigeonholed me into Team Garbageman (person who does the projects that nobody else wants).

Our company implements Holacracy which largely solves this problem.

If it's any consolation, I've spent most of my career working remote and I'd say probably the richest experiences I've learned from depended on who and what they were working on WAY more than them being there in person, and those richer experiences didn't really have a hell of a lot of zoom meeting and other distracting nonsense. The communication simply shifts to text based chat with a nice handy record of communication to look back on and consider over a longer period of time, where the information is more salient.

Basically -- how do you think open source has been doing it since practically the 90s?

I do get the issues with onboarding/mentorship (as well as social) especially right out of school. I suspect that many companies are just trying to do business as usual rather than adapting. It's also worth pointing out that we're talking about remote during a pandemic. In normal times, there's nothing to keep teams from traveling to a location for a week. (Yes, some people have travel issues for various reasons but in general the statement stands.)

I think the tough part is that fresh grads will benefit a lot from the senior developers being physically present, but I get the impression that many senior devs will choose not to come to the office unless they are required to.

So, I don't think it's as simple as letting people choose when and how often to come to the office. I could see a hybrid 2 days local / 3 days remote model working if physical presence is mandatory on those two days.

The challenge with a hybrid model is that you pretty much want housing that has a comfortable private work area and an at least semi-reasonable commute. That's probably fairly doable in a lot of suburban areas but it's harder for an urban office.

That said, I expect this will be quite common and people are probably more willing to have a 90 minute each way commute, say, if they only have to do it once or twice a week. (That's about what I'd be to go into our Boston office. That would be lousy to do most days--as I can attest to from a prior company--but it's not that bad to do once a week especially in the nicer weather.)

> Basically -- how do you think open source has been doing it since practically the 90s?

This! I don't get how HN, a community of hackers who can't but be aware of FLOSS, could claim with a straight face that "remote doesn't work" in the face of things like LKML.

It's killing me slowly right now. I got hired in the middle of the pandemic and I think just 6 people even know I exist. I've spent more time talking with HR than my team members. Not for what you think, I respond to their emails and chats so we get along great. My team is mostly on DnD, no idea what their working on and emails take 24-48 hours to respond.

I feel you, it's been really tough on me too, for many of the same reasons. I don't feel like part of the team, and it's not really clear what my purpose is. When this is all over maybe I'll take a break from this lonely career and spend some time in a more human-facing role like teaching.

Start making 1-1 meetings just to get to know people better and the kind of things they do. Make sure you mostly work on projects where you can collaborate closely with 1-3 other people.

I'd like to but unfortunately they are using that stupid department billing system. For me to collaborate I have to be invited in, basically. Can't have an engineer working on a project they aren't billing for no matter how interesting it looks.

I'm trying to find the project managers so they know I'm available and to include me on future projects. The current projects are staffed up and any change in manpower is a change request, client approval, etc.

Totally feel that, I'm in the same position.

Interns we've on-boarded, especially from non-CS background programs, all have had these kinds of issues.

It's been getting better, but I don't see how it's possible to have anything close to "real" mentor-ship schemes with full WFH. When I was interning most of learning happened not with my project but with interacting with the team and seeing/understanding what they did.

I have a sneaking feeling that the productivity boosts due to WFH mostly come from more senior devs w/ specific workstreams that are benefiting from more "head down" time, but without mentoring/training new ppl the quality hiring pool will go down over time.

Thanks for sharing. Your company definitely needs some “how to WFH” training. Taking 24-48 hours to respond to an e-mail is totally, absurdly unacceptable, and if I (as a fairly senior guy) saw this regularly happening, I’d bring it to the offender’s attention and to their manager if they didn’t take corrective action. If someone is too busy to respond to their e-mail, they need to discuss their workload with their manager.

>Those of you who think that remote-work-by-default would be a good thing, can I ask how your companies are handling career progression and collaboration, as well as mentorship of junior developers?

Frankly, my employer sucks-ass at this anyway. So no real difference. I suspect there are a LOT of small-time employers that are like this.

I've worked at other companies where they do much better at collaboration and even have formal mentorship programs (Lockheed-Martin). Yes, I very much miss working for those companies, but given that I've relocated since then, it's really not an option.

I feel those are traditionally handled very badly anyway. Career progression tends to happen more in job interviews.

This is a valid concern, but I don't think WFH affects it much. A company that values employee career progression and collaboration will do so regardless of work arrangement. most of the companies I've worked for haven't been very effective at managing any sort of career progression.

I'm working towards my promotion to Senior engineer right now. My manager and I have weekly video-call one on ones, discussing my progress.

I'm also mentoring a new hire, fresh from college. He's kicking ass and it's going really well. We mostly talk over slack, but we also do weekly video calls, or ad-hoc when he's stuck on something.

I'm not saying it's as good at this as it was in-person, but we find ways to make it work.

Remember, the goal is to find the best solution possible, not to discount any solution that doesn't have 100% coverage of the old solution. We may lose ground in some respects in order to gain it in many more.

We’ve had several onboarded some right out of college since quarantine started and they are all doing well.

Bumping into people is actually a problem, but career progression is less so, as there is a lot more time for 1-1 mentorship, pairing, etc.

The bumping into people part can be solved though, especially with occasional in person events. We’ve had whole teams not located within our area and have worked with them just fine. Being noticed is also fine - people still give presentations, do launch events, and connect with others through managers, pms, etc.

>We’ve had whole teams not located within our area and have worked with them just fine.

A lot of people look at in-office through the lens of entire companies or at least pretty much everyone they interact with being co-located. I, on the other hand, am on a broader team spread over about 9 time zones and, on a given day, I can be talking with people in 5 different offices plus remote/traveling. If I went into a local office pre-pandemic, there was a good chance I wouldn't run into anyone I knew.

Your concerns are valid. I think this is really an opportunity to get intentional about networking and learning within your company. Everyone else is presumably in the same boat, so if I was early in my career I would focus on becoming the best remote networker and learner possible.

Most people will just go with the flow and not really adapt intentionally to the situation so in some ways you may be able to actually stand out more than normal with less effort.

I feel like making a career change to teaching as well. But the horror stories I hear about how hostile parents are towards teachers, and the fact that I'd take a pay-cut to about 1/3 of what I'm making have prevented me from considering it seriously.

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